Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
I mean, pretty sure FR10 was written first.
D&D General Forgotten Realms: Real World Gods Still Present in the Old Empires
- Thread starter Nicholas Reed
- Start date
pukunui
Legend
Also the ancient Greeks (Chessenta).
Not sure why they made it so the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians were all the same ethnicity but anyway ...
Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
I mean, I think the idea is that all three groups merged and re-split over thousands of years, and are interelated now.
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
To be fair, all these groups are . . . from the same planet! I dont think Toril cares about the details.
Regarding Chessenta. My impression is, this Greece despite what Greenwood says. Greenwood stated in 2020, it wasnt "originally" Greece, and pushing back a bit, compared Chessenta to 1400s Italy instead. Yet the fan base seems to understand it to be Greece anyway. And to be fair, Greece does make much more sense in the context of the Earthling "Old Empires" of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Heh, Greenwood actually goes so far as to insist, "no part of my original Realms was based on any direct real-world analogues". Heh, this seems to me, a gygaxian level of implausible deniability. (LOL. Gygax denied Tolkien influence.) I assume Greenwood is the one who made the Moonshae Isles Celtic. He refers profusely to Norse traditions, American Indigenous traditions, lampshades for Greek gods, etcetera etcetera. These are all based on direct reallife analogues.
In any case, the Egypt−Sumer−Greece team up is the one that seems to prevail among the way that dedicated fans play the Forgotten Realms.
(For the record, I prefer using reallife analogues in D&D, because it encourages creators to pay attention to ethnic diversity. I also like adding into the mix, truly novel cultures that dont really refer to reallife history. But I feel, if using reallife names from ethnic heritages, it self-imposes an obligation to accurately represent this name and doublecheck reallife sensitivities. When modifying a culture, it is easier to modify the name too.)
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
To be clear, while Gygax minimized the influence of Tolkien on D&D, he did concede that things such as hobbits, orcs, ents, etc. were derived from his work.
No, that was Douglas Niles. As per Shannon Appelcline's history of FR2 Moonshae:
Meanwhile, Jeff Grubb and Ed Greenwood were preparing the Forgotten Realms for publication by the main TSR offices in Wisconsin; they wanted novels to support that line, but didn’t have time to write them on their own because they were working on the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (1987) and the impending line of “FR” sourcebooks. As Niles' partly written novel was traditional (Celtic) fantasy, it was a pretty good fit for the Realms.
Grubb and Greenwood threw out the Moonshae Islands that had been used in Greenwood's own Realms campaign and replaced them with the setting of Niles’ book. The novel, Darkwalker on Moonshae (1987), was then released as one of the first two Forgotten Realms products in May 1987 — alongside the compiled I3-5: Desert of Desolation (1987) adventure; it was so early in the release of the Realms that the novel didn't even carry the Forgotten Realms logo on the cover for its first printing!
Amphytrion
Adventurer
This is because both things are true: Ed claims (and I'll take him at his word) that the original FR sold to TSR did not include real-world analogues. However, TSR wanted some regions of the world to reflect some real world analogues: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, etc. Therefore, they replaced parts of FR with fantasy-inspired versions of those ancient civilizations.
Ed tells this story in his Youtube channel, in the episode about Unther. The operative word in his tweet above is indeed "originally". For the overwhelming majority of its publication history, Chessenta has been fantasy Greece. According to Ed, no one ever read his original ideas in print, all fans ever saw was the TSR Old Empires publication.
cbwjm
Legend
I don't know much about Chessenta, but the mulan weren't the same ethnicity when first grabbed by Imasker, they were different when first brought over then through intermarriage became the mulan.
I only know this because I've been recently reading the 2e FR deity books.
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
But did Greenwood really not refer to American Indigenous, Norse, Celtic, Greek, and other reallife analogues?
Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
OK, here's the thing: Greenwood is not the one who made the Moonshae Isles Celtic and British Twee. The Moonshae Isles in the published Setting were imported from another Setting product thst got cancelled, because TSR had a novel ready to go by Douglas Niles. So they replaced an archipelago that was like Ursula K. LeGuinn's Earthsea with this cancelled Setting from TSR UK.
All of the "real world analogues" were actually added to the Setting after TSR bought it, and tacked them on: Damara and Vaasa were originally the vaguely Slavic Setting for Modules H1-4 (also by Douglas Niles) which they replaced an area of uninhabited glacier with, or Maztica (also...by...Douglas Niles...) which came out of nowhere (other than Douglas Niles wanting to write self-insert fanfic of himself as Hernando Cortez).
The important point is, Douglas Niles ruined everything.
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
And Greenwood never referred to Tyr (originally)?
